UPDATE, July 16, 2014, 3 p.m. ET: The Israel Defense Forces have launched an initial investigation into the incident, according to Israeli news source Haaretz, which cites senior IDF officials as saying that initial findings show the children were killed by an air strike meant for Hamas militants. IDF is investigating the possibility that there was misinformation or that the strikes missed their target.

Four children were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday that hit in close proximity to al-Deira Hotel, a Gaza City hotel full of foreign journalists.

The attack, NBC News reported, came at around 4 p.m. local time and appeared to be the result of a naval shell.

At least two additional children were injured, according to local reports.

The journalists, both local freelancers and international correspondents with NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, AFP and more, tweeted about the airstrike in the moments after it hit — some of them reported hearing two explosions before running to the scene of the blasts.

2 loud bangs near our hotel, 2 children and their father injured whilst on the beach in front of the al-deira hotel. #Gaza#c4news

By the south wall we heard a very loud explosion, and thinking it was either some kind of naval gunfire or more artillery, where you see fisherman and their children often getting their stuff ready.

We see this billowing brown smoke and very, very quickly we realize there are people running through the smoke. We didn't know then that four of the children – they're all part of a family called the al-Baqqa family – they came running down. And as I'm standing looking down on this wall, kind of a little place that people go down on weekends.

While I'm standing down looking toward this wall … there's an adult and three children were turning the corner at the beach waving at us, kind of trying to say "Can we come to the beach, will you help us?" – they got hit by a second artillery round. By the time they made it, the adult, a man of about thirty, clearly had a stump … from shrapnel.

The three boys got brought up to the terrace where we work and fortunately we had some medical kits, and we very quickly went to work on the two kids who'd been injured. A child brought in, about eight I guess, eight or nine, got a shrapnel wound to the chest, as the other'd been injured in the arm and the head, and we gave first aid while the ambulances came.

We were worried at first that the hole in his chest might spill through into his lung. We wanted to stop the bleeding but also to try and make sure he was all right until the ambulance came. So some other colleagues helped his brother or cousin I guess, with the head injury.

Others in the hotel took video as the children arrived — at least one journalist can be seen holding an iPhone inches from the face of an injured child.

He shared a photo (warning: it’s graphic) of a young boy who was “pulled from the flames and did not look alive.”

The beach, where the children had been playing only moments before, is under normal circumstances a popular spot for families and children and even surfers — an escape from the dusty and crowded refugee camps in the strip.

A video posted on YouTube shows emergency workers responding to the attack on the beach. (Warning: some parts of the video are graphic.)

Minutes before they were killed in the airstrike, the children were playing on the beach. As NBC News’s Ayman Mohyeldin tweeted, “I was kicking a ball with them.”

4 Palestinian kids killed in a single Israeli airstrike. Minutes before they were killed by our hotel, I was kicking a ball with them #gaza

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